What’s Next for AI and Marketing? Experts Weigh In

While AI can do great things for influencer campaigns, at what point does the use of AI tools affect the authenticity a creator’s audience relies on? Creators build their followings, big or small, based on trust. Brands looking to partner with creators depend on that same level of sincerity, since it provides credibility to product reviews and recommendations. —Ali Fazal, vice president of marketing, GRIN

Personalization

Over the past few months, there’s been a significant shift in mar tech from marketing automation to marketing autonomy. An autonomous marketing framework has three essential elements—data, decision-making and delivery—and artificial intelligence is the main player in each. Personalized data triggers AI to initiate actions. Decision-making engines handle segmentation and forecast behaviors, ultimately delivering more constant and customized communications to customers.

We’ll see an even deeper integration of OpenAI into creative processes. However, I still see OpenAI more as a productivity tool than a content creation engine. According to Accenture, AI can increase productivity by up to 40%—though tests on our AI email generator proved to be six times faster at creating newsletters, slashing the average time from 19 to 3 minutes. The productivity potential of AI tools may be underestimated, and we are yet to be impressed by it.

What’s left to marketers in the era of autonomous marketing, then? Strategy ideation and creative choices. —Aleksandra Korczynska, CMO, GetResponse

Programmatic

For our AdOps team and possibly others across the ad-tech industry who use it, ChatGPT has been a key resource in generating code for Meta/Facebook pixels using a developer tool link and analyzing competitors’ websites to help create new marketing strategies with a competitive edge. In terms of ChatGPT’s impact within programmatic, that could be more challenging to predict due to the nascency of the tool. Audience and channel planning will still require human insight and optimization. However, there’s potential for a programmatic application to provide optimization recommendations within the demand-side platform during a campaign’s flight. —Liza Bortnikova, COO and co-founder, AI Digital

Search

We don’t use Google search the same way we used to. The average attention span of internet users is 2.5 seconds: When looking for a quick result, many of us scan Instant Answers, the zero-click summary that Google generates, rather than clicking the links provided. Now, ChatGPT is offering an even simpler solution; users can ask the AI chatbot questions and receive detailed, tailored information that directly answers their query.

Microsoft has invested $10 billion in ChatGPT and plans to integrate the AI software into its existing search engine, Bing, whose app saw a tenfold increase in downloads after this announcement. Google has now opened the waitlist for its own AI chatbot Bard. As more users take advantage of the benefits of AI-integrated search, brands stand to gain less traction from SEO and paid Google ads as traditional search engine usage decreases.

Brands must overcome the migration away from Google search due to AI software with a social-first advertising strategy that includes brand campaigns on TikTok. Creating searchable videos that inspire user-generated content will spread awareness of your brand among a Gen Z audience, even as fewer users turn to Google to discover new brands. —Chris Kastenholz, CEO and co-founder, Pulse Advertising